David Vining's Blog, page 141

A Vacation, of sorts

It’ll be the tenth anniversary of my marriage to my wife, Olivia, on the 17th, and we’re going on a Caribbean cruise to celebrate. I’ll be completely without internet, but because I’m a maniac I’ve written enough reviews to tide me over until I get back, auto-publishing through the 10th.

And what better movies to break with than the Pirates of the Caribbean movies? It’s just too perfect of a fit to pass up.

So, comment away and tell me how I’m wrong. I’ll respond once I get internet ag...

Stagecoach

This is the movie that most people seem to think begins John Ford’s career. Well, that ain’t true at all. It’s not his first western, and it’s not his first film with John Wayne. What it happens to be was an inflection point in Ford’s career and in the direction of American cinema. One of several large westerns in 1938 and 1939 that blew up the box office, Stagecoach helped signal the return of the western into pop culture, having languished for a decade because of the difficulties of captur...

Submarine Patrol

I’ve found the Today We Live of John Ford’s body of work. Mired with a 5.9 out of 10 rating at the IMDb, the last little movie Ford made before the public is really cognizant of his work with Stagecoach, it’s a hidden gem, a wonderful film of love in the time of war while also a surprisingly cohesive ensemble piece at the same time. This is a complete package of a film, exciting, moving, and really quite endearing, that it’s forgotten and diminished status is a small travesty of justice. Sub...

Four Men and a Prayer

A sort of independent spy thriller, John Ford’s Four Men and a Prayer tells the story of four sons of a British colonel who investigate the circumstances around his dishonorable discharge and murder. It’s got a great cast, globetrotting, and gun smugglers, but in the end I found the exercise a bit deflating overall. Some of the pieces were there, but so much was either missing or confused that the actual spy adventure parts of the film never really felt all that convincing or interesting.

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The Hurricane

This was really not what I had expected. Pretty much anything written about this film puts the titular hurricane first and foremost, an exercise in special effects that is really quite impressive. However, it’s really just the final twenty minutes or so of the hundred minute film, the rest being something quite different. Based on the novel of the same name by James Norman Hall (the movie’s star’s uncle), The Hurricane is more of an open conversation on the responsibilities of a colonial gov...

Wee Willie Winkie

I’m pretty sure this is the first Shirley Temple movie I’ve seen where she was her iconic child self, and I can see the easy appeal she must have had on the masses in the 30s. She was a precocious, adorable child with a surprising amount of ability at such a young age. Paired with John Ford in this adaptation of a Rudyard Kipling story about a young boy (changed to a girl in the film) who goes to India to live with her grandfather, a British colonel, and her efforts to become a little soldie...

The Plough and the Stars

I think this is another movie like Seas Beneath where John Ford’s time making it was so bad that he couldn’t see the movie itself anymore. Based on a play by Sean O’Casey, The Plough and the Stars was supposed to be a cinematic adaptation of the play as it was and star the original Abbey Theater cast. Well, RKO forced him to hire Barbara Stanwyck and Preston Foster to lead the film (the rest of the cast mostly being the original theatrical cast), and they cut down on some of the political ed...

Mary of Scotland

By all accounts, John Ford got bored of this historical costume drama while he made it. It has a professional stamp, but there’s nothing that seems to have engaged him. It’s an adaptation of a play by Maxwell Anderson of the same name, and it’s the kind of biopic that just rankles me. It tries to take on a large, complicated life, and bundle it down into a tight two hours. Instead of trying to focus on one aspect of this story, the film ends up shining an equal amount of light onto several d...

The Prisoner of Shark Island

Abraham Lincoln has been on the edge of a few of John Ford’s work, most notably The Iron Horse where he was the impetus for the overall action of building a transcontinental railroad (Ulysses S. Grant deserved no mention, apparently). Here, Ford tells the story of a man accused of conspiracy in the assassination of Lincoln, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd, a Maryland country doctor who set the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth after Booth’s jump from the balcony at Ford’s Theater and before word of the dee...

Steamboat Round the Bend

Endings are important, and even in light comedies with adventure undertones, those endings end up helping to shape everything that came before it. I was a bit flustered by the first hour or so of John Ford’s Steamboat Round the Bend, finding things to like but frustrated at the extraordinary loose nature of the telling, but the ending brought everything together in rip-roaring fashion. Will Rogers’ final filmed role before his airplane crash that killed him ends up being a fancifully enterta...